I suspect regarding the meal ticket amounts we are not comparing apples to apples.  For example how many have an in-house vs contracted meal service?  If contracted, there is usually a guaranted profit margin, etc.  Urban vs rural also probably enters into the picture.

We recently had a rather large price increase in the cafeteria and our goal is to make sure a volunteer can get a meat and 3 + drink for our meal ticket face value.

We are revisiting our meal ticket policy for our volunteers.  It has been several years since information was posted to this forum, so can you please tell me your currently volunteer policy on meal tickets?  Also, how large is your volunteer program and what are you given as your annual budget for volunteer meals?  Thank you!

We do not issue "tickets" but volunteers can get a meal using their volunteer name badge.  The limit is $6 per person per day.  There would be no way for me to physically hand each volunteer a ticket each day they come in.  Some may come in on days they don't work to get a meal using their badge, but if they did, the staff would catch it and let me know. We are in a very rural area and a person has to drive to get to our hospital; we aren't in walking distance from any residential area.  

I have 435 volunteers; about 130 are in the hospital monthly.  Others work from home or in the community on behalf of the hospital and usually do not take advantage of the meal benefit.  My budget for this is right around $24,000 a year ($2000 a month).

We mail birthday cards to each volunteer which can be turned in to the café for a celebration meal (meal time, eat-in/takeout, $ amount not limited).  Volunteers enjoy this special gift and we encourage them to "get the works!"  On special occasions, we distribute free cookie/beverage tickets and have also given free meal tickets to volunteers who have stayed over to cover an unexpected absence.  Volunteers also get free coffee/cappuccino at any time and the employee discount on all purchased food items.

We increased our meal ticket from $4 to $6 in spring of 2015. Neither our volunteers or our employees receive any kind of meal discount. We call ours a snack voucher as most of our volunteers are here for a 3 hour volunteer shift. It is a paper voucher, that currently isn't numbered. We've worked on the honor system historically, but have had a myriad of issues over the last several months. The biggest issue is that volunteers stockpile paper vouchers and then use groups of them at once to purchase "food for the weekend". We are thinking about moving to a numbered system.

We have about 15 restaurant options they can chose from on our campus. Each of those locations bills us individually.

I have about 4000 volunteers, but only 200 of them are adults. We only provide snack vouchers to our adult volunteer population and not many of them take advantage of it. My hospital budget for this is about $8,000 annually. Usually, I cover another $8,000 through department fundraisers (hospital vendor sales).